re continually in the mouths of the
historians. 'God sees the wretched people,' says the Saxon
Chronicler, 'most unjustly oppressed; first they are despoiled of
their possessions, and then butchered.' This was a grievous year
(1124). Whoever had any property, lost it by heavy taxes and unjust
decrees."--_2 Middle Ages_, 435-6.

"In the succeeding reign of _John_, all the rapacious exactions usual
to these Norman kings were not only redoubled, but mingled with
outrages of tyranny still more intolerable. * *

"In 1207 John took a seventh of the movables of lay and spiritual
persons, all murmuring, but none daring to speak against
it."--_Ditto_, 446.

In Hume's account of the extortions of those times, the following
paragraph occurs:

"But the most barefaced acts of tyranny and oppression were practised
against the Jews, who were entirely out of the protection of the law,
and were abandoned to the immeasurable rapacity of the king and his
ministers. Besides many other indignities, to which they were
continually exposed, it appears that they were once all thrown into
prison, and the sum of 66,000 marks exacted for their liberty. At
another time, Isaac, the Jew, paid alone 5100 marks; Brun, 3000
marks; Jurnet, 2000; Bennet, 500. At another, Licorica, widow of
David, the Jew of Oxford, was required to pay 6000 marks."--_Hume's
Hist. Eng., Appendix_ 2.

Further accounts of the extortions and oppressions of the kings may be
found in Hume's History, Appendix 2, and in Hallam's Middle Ages, vol.
2, p. 435 to 446.

By Magna Carta John bound himself to make restitution for some of the
spoliations he had committed upon individuals "_without the legal
judgment of their peers_."--_See Magna Carta of John_, ch. 60, 61, 65
and 66.

One of the great charges, on account of which the nation rose against
John, was, that he plundered individuals of their property, "_without
legal judgment of their peers_." Now it was evidently very weak and
short-sighted in John to expose himself to such charges, _if his laws
were really obligatory upon the peers_; because, in that case, he could
have enacted any laws that were necessary for his purpose, and then, by
civil suits, have brought the cases before juries for their "judgment,"
and thus have accomplished all his robberies in a perfectly legal
manner.

There would evidently have been no sense in these complaints, that he
depr